Joshua Cohen - Witz

The Market of Spinoza Street

At a river, a moat, which used to be, everything was, had been or did, I don’t know — and then, there’s a settlement further, a mere slip over the water, halffrozen.

It’s the water, though, or the freeze of it, its icelife, its slushy rush as the two of them can never again become separated: the water flowing from the water stilled…no matter its state, the water’s it: the model, in that it’s everyone’s and yet it’s no one’s, too, and how the heifer — it refuses to ford. We stand at the edge of the slick, as it leans us over to lick, slaking its thirst, a quick lapping melt. O to have a tongue, even if leatherette. At its first lick, however, the burden of its bend, it drops, flattens, luxuriously redrugged, shagged…I should’ve kept it to sell or trade: its limbs splayed out in every direction north, east, flat, dead. I dismount by standing up on its carcass, walk around my moribund ride. And the river. How you cross is you have to wait for the sign — there’s nothing mystical about it, however: the sign’s petrified driftwood, or metal. It floats through the moat, floats around and around the moat, on a slow slog with the current. I wait and it comes. It comes fluming past icefloes, its edges shearing off hunks, here it is swirling and knocking and turning around. When it finally nears, is directly across, I step down, it’s only one step to the slab: not tempting to test but a plunge, then to spring up from my fare, passing quickly…thinking, it’s impossible to know depth without falling — how I won’t make that mistake ever again (falling and falling and).

Interpretobold Symbolizetti Allegoriovitch Mystificinski , makes no sense…here’s strange! Estranging! By your leave, comrade citizen, with your consent:

On the other side, this village, this town, if it’s even anything of only one street. What’s it called? What’s its name? I forget, didn’t have the time to notice while stepping down on what’s said. That sign, floating around and around the moat, over and under its weak skinflint freeze — if you’ll just wait by the banks, for a moment, you’ll glimpse it…it’ll come around again and again, have patience, have faith. Everything occurs twice, to begin with, to bore: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce; the third time as the third time, then the hundredth as the hundredth, unlessoned, unlearned. A sign in that many languages, related and not: Spinoza Straße, Spinoza Prospekt, Spinoza Ulice, Spinoza Gatve, Str. Spinoza, Vul. Spinoza , , Spinoza Street …streeting around the town let’s call it entire of only one street, and so it’s no town at all, and yet neither a village, only a poor lick of rubble rimming the hoar of the moat — and so it’s an island, if an island singly streeted with a street that both borders it and is it, too, you with me, a street that in turn islands the island; enough that it’s another refuge of sorts, if more forlorn than any before. And less an island, it seems once you’re on it and of it, than a pock of the earth, more like a pox, the scar of a wound from within, from without, bandaged by a moat so small in hindsight, and so shallow especially when frozen and holding or not, that I could’ve stepped across its surface, its depth, in only one step, singly strided. Forgetting the sign, the bobbing slat of its bridge. Onto this street narrowingly small in width if endless in length, in its loop, apparently infinite in its hellaciously circling circle. A street laden with the miscellaneously malevolent detritus that comes with the keeping of openair files: with papers of leave and conscription, with torn passports, the shred of visas to countries no longer bordered, receipts for burials, the crumple of death certificates, and crinkled, inksoaked m.a.n.i.f.e.s.t.o.s., sectarian statements of divergent platforms and parties, their transcripts of speeches and personnel report files, cadre profiles intermixed with assorted briefs on party discipline, calendar reform, and name standardization, stacks of cash worth nothing of late, bribes to (codename) Eurous the easterly wind; tarnished badges and medals, commendations, citations and trophies, epaulets, lapels missing pins, ribbons ripped, and tattered robes of the law, discarded after having been used as wrappers, too, for food, for milk and cheese and as swaddling clothes, blown along with the refuse of drinks, plastic and tinned, cans of pilsen beer, wineskins, vodka flasks and jugs drained of who’s selling; raffletickets irredeemable, and snowwhite, pupilless eyeballs numbered in an approximation of lotto — a squareless street lined with unmarked, drearily festooned stalls, one impossible to differentiate from another, a uniform gray-wood or other cheap synthetic substance as a matter of coarse, lined down the street more like around the street, and then around the street again around the rivering ice of the moat, its submerged then surfacing sign, then around again and again forever and ever, a fixedly infinite eternal return of the now, its street its mode and its trashy stalls its attributes (if only in the founding philosophical system — which no longer prevails), all one and the same of its Substance, which is indivisible and, also, monstrously gray. All the stalls are made of this vagary, of this allied alloy…I’m just passing it on: that the stalls have been created of coin, of planchet, of flan, are themselves — eventually, with the weather — total coin and as such, apparently, totally changeless: this dull gunmetal nondenominational mix, a circulation without breed as unsunderable, indivisble…impossible for its elements to be molten separate ever again; that weather judging down all through the day and night to mint the stalls’ rooftops and reeded sides in the image of rain, of snow, and the composite between them, to a resounding clinking and clatter of no tender issue, overpowering of every imaginable thought, so destructive.

Strange, too, to notice that no matter the smallness of the street, by which I mean how narrow it is as such circle or cycles are as long as our lives, that I can never find the same stall on it twice, ever again and despite following such directions as I beg openmouthed, despite counting my fingers to numbers I’m deluded to mean: and maybe because there are no wares on display in the stalls (everything, and I do mean everything, is kept under the counter, and one should be hesitant to ask, I’ve been asked), how there’re no signs to the stalls, no numbers either except those imposed by memory in its imperfect ars mathematica…the higher geometry of borderless politics, the containment of illimitable will within mundane circumference, the daily and done — no coordinates save those supplied by the worst and, presently, only philosophy left us, which is that of hope…in that, I’m an expert. And then advice, too, which is the only thing in this market given for free, and in a quantity scarily excessive: actually advice, directions, counseling’s comfort, though all with the aim to a profit of any sort to be made down the line, the length of which is infinite, mortality depending. Along the way the long way around, only the forgotten are to be met — not as much met as to be unforgotten, in advice, in directions, in their comforting counsel: the windword, the snuff or guttering pass, offered to me as to all in hushes, shushes, incomprehensible whispers; such menschs or goys who knows who they are if and when they even don’t, who can care, they prole around, go ghostly a float down the street and so around the moated float of that one uninterpretable sign: Spinoza, who’s he, what’s he got to do with assimilation, with the secularism that’s only adaptation, an evolution toward any new reality, with our governance remade…the intersection of individual life with that of the State, the interstices of mensch and God, and the meaning of what that God is exactly, if not merely the subtotal of us: me, you, Refugee, A refugee, This refugee , viz. I recognize me-in-you, I recognize me-as-you, I recognize only us in proposition and lemma…starvedhollow in tears of scraprags, unshaven into these greatgut beards, this imperious hair atop, too, and those old philosopher eyes — empty, sockets: as if the wicks of candles blown out in their own industrygusts, only smoke; their mouths null islands themselves as they’re opened advising, they’re making their trades, their marking remarx…